Author’s Note: I’ll be sending out 1-2 longreads (1000+ word) essays a month on Friday. I hope you enjoy them!
Originally written Sept 2023
Do I want to be free?
Do I want to be a master of language?
Or do I want to be an object of it?
—Paul Tran, poet, at the 2024 RWW Winter Writer’s Retreat
My first jobs were all about language and communication. I taught it in university to my peers, and then I taught it in a high school in Japan. As part of the Japanese English Teaching Programme, my entire raison d’entre was to stand as a living monument of English to whom students could interact.
To understand this, you must also get that English in Japan is taught very algorithmically. It is often exclusively something that students experience in the classroom or through their screens. It’s got cultural cache, but that’s very different to understanding how the English language is a living breathing thing. It’s similar to me when I studied Spanish. For almost two decades, my main engagement with the language was entirely in school and through classrooms. But it wasn’t until I went abroad … It wasn’t until I started using the words and putting sentences together in real-life situations in Mexico … That’s when I finally grokked: This is a real language you can communicate with AND I know it!
So I had an inkling of the gap that separated my Japanese students from engaging with their living monument.
One of my first activities was that I opened class with a greeting to each student because I wanted them to have to interact with me one on one as opposed to being in a group. What I quickly learned was how the phrase: “I’m fine thank you and you” was more like one word to them: Imfinethankyouandyou. When they heard the question: “How are you?” That triggered the one word response. It was a sound that had no meaning to my students. Much like ChatGPT, they’d been trained to output the appropriate response.
I started messing with the algorithm. I taught them variations of the question and the response like “S’up” and “I’m cool” or “How’s it hanging” and “It’s going great.” Ultimately as teaching does, it got me to think about why I do things. Thus, I began to understand how I have linguistic programming in me, as well. I also had stock answers uploaded in the buffer. But that if I started to actually think about them … If instead of leaving them to muscle memory, I actually became intentional over the words …. Eventually I recovered a power I didn’t even know I’d lost.
On my return to the States, I often got frustrated over how even with the same language in our heads, there were so many misunderstandings. Often, native speakers fell back on buffered and algorithmic speech patterns, deploying language without precision and dexterity. It was just crystal clear to me because I’d spent two years of my life where my job was to mess with the formulas to provoke genuine human engagement. Even if my students tried to retreat into the group, it was my responsibility to pull them out and spark something out of their mouths that would never happen through a textbook.
In Japan, I learned how language is more than words. It’s also tied to your body, your voice, your emotions, your surroundings. I learned how to wield all my tools to my advantages. I learned that there’s no such thing as perfect communication. Even my rudimentary Japanese could be beautiful. It produced beautiful conversations that would never happen if I was fluent. Likewise, I loved the mishmash of accents and language that came out of my expat community. Together, we spoke in an argot unique to us.
Ultimately, I think language is one of the most beautiful and wonderful things we as the human race have created. There have been countless made and countless lost. It is always changing. Whatever was said before will be different tomorrow. Humans are wired to seek out new and innovative ways to convey our thoughts and our hearts as much as ourselves.
For the last 20 years, I’ve listened to leaders, technologists, industries, and societies tell me the end of language is coming. In this last year, AI is the latest doom to this unparalleled invention of communal human ingenuity. Even as I’m in meetings where a business is trying to subjugate communication through templates, I continue to see daily proof in how much language shapes us—for better or worse.
But forget the world. Let’s just focus on you! Do you want to be free?
Then open your mouth.
Put your pen to paper.
Type on your keyboard … Speak!